Certificate Administration

FSC™ requires certificate holders to document how they intend to manage their forests. They then evaluate three things:

Do the documents adequately describe a system of management consistent with FSC's robust principles and criteria for responsible forest management?

Is there documentary evidence that this system is being followed?

Is this documentary evidence reflected by what they see in the forest?

The situation is the same for a group certificate, such as MCDI holds, with the additional complication that the group must establish systems for managing its membership and disputes between members and other members, and disputes with the group certificate manager.

Control Documents

In order to achieve this MCDI has documented its system through a series of control documents. As each document changes its version number is incremented and the prveious version is archived for later reference should there be a need. This section of the website provides access to the entire catalogue of control documents used in the administration of MCDI's group certificate.

All group members are rural communities whose first language is Swahili. Some of the Control Documents are therefore written in English, and others in Swahili; English translations are provided of those documents written in Swahili.